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Introducing Pivot Tables 34
Laying out the pivot table
Next, set up the actual layout of the pivot table. You can do so by using either of these techniques:
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Drag the field names to one of the four boxes in the PivotTable Field List.
Right-click a field name and choose its location from the shortcut menu.
In previous versions of Excel, you could drag items from the field list directly into the appropriate
area of the pivot table. This feature is still available, but it’s turned off by default. To
enable this feature, choose PivotTable Tools ➪ Options ➪ PivotTable Options ➪ Options to display the
PivotTable Options dialog box. Click the Display tab and add a check mark next to Classic PivotTable Layout.
NOTE
The following steps create the pivot table presented earlier in this chapter (see “A pivot table example”). For
this example, I drag the items from the top of the PivotTable Field List to the areas in the bottom of the
PivotTable Field List.
1. Drag the Amount field into the Values area. At this point, the pivot table displays the total of
all the values in the Amount column.
2. Drag the AcctType field into the Row Labels area. Now the pivot table shows the total amount
for each of the account types.
3. Drag the Branch field into the Column Labels area. The pivot table shows the amount for each
account type, cross-tabulated by branch (see Figure 34.7).
FIGURE 34.7
After a few simple steps, the pivot table shows a summary of the data.
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